THE ILLUSORY MOZART: SELFISH MEMES IN THE PRIESTS’ MARCHES

FROM IDOMENEO AND DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE

for Julian Rushton

I want to claim almost limitless power for slightly inaccurate self-replicating entities,

once they arise anywhere in the universe. This is because they tend to become the

basis for Darwinian selection which, given enough generations, cumulatively builds

systems of great complexity.

(Dawkins 1989: 322)

1. CONTEXT: THE LATE SUMMER OF 1791

In comparing the Priests’ Marches from Mozart’s Idomeneo K. 366 (1781) and

Die Zauberflöte K. 620 (1791), Rushton observes that the earlier march ‘…breathes

an air of mystery which anticipates another temple, in Die Zauberflöte’ (1993: 105).

The affinity is apparent to the ear, yet the marches share much more than a mood of

hushed devotion: my concern here will be to show that musical similarities between

them are such that one can clearly regard the later march as replicating, in various

ways, much of the content of the earlier.

First, the background. By mid-July of 1791 Mozart had completed the bulk of

the work on Die Zauberflöte, but in his Verzeichnüß aller meiner Werke we see the

opera entered, in that month, using the opening bars of Tamino’s ‘Zu hilfe!’ (number

1) as the incipit (see Rosenthal and Tyson 1991: 57). With the exception of Die

Entführung aus dem Serail, the overture was the last part of Mozart’s operas to be

composed, being put aside while vocal sections were completed so the singers could

begin work. With Die Zauberflöte, the composition of the Priests’ March, the only

other extended instrumental number, was also deferred, Mozart presumably intending

to write it later with the Overture.

The reason Mozart entered Die Zauberflöte under the incipit of ‘Zu hilfe!’

rather than, as normal, under that of the Overture is clear: before the Overture and

March could be started, the composer was compelled to begin work on La clemenza di

Tito K. 621 for the coronation of Leopold II at Prague, the opera being scheduled for

its première on 6 September 1791.1 Landon suggests the impresario Domenico

Guardasoni offered Mozart the commission shortly after 16 July, after unsuccessfully

attempting to engage Antonio Salieri (1988: 96). According to Solomon, Mozart and

his entourage (Constanze and Franz Xaver Süssmayr) left Vienna on or around 25

August and arrived in Prague on 28 August. After the festivities, they left the

Bohemian capital on or around 15 September, arriving home on or around 18

September (1995: 485, 487).

1 Köhler suggests that the ‘contour’ of the Overture was established before Mozart departed for Prague

(in Branscombe 1991: 81–82). Branscombe 1991 Chapter 4 is a summary of the complex evidence

surrounding the composition of Die Zauberflöte.

2

It is not unreasonable to suggest that Mozart had little or no time to work on

the remainder of Die Zauberflöte after the première of Tito; Landon lists the

composer’s busy schedule between 6 and 12 September, although, it must be said, he

lists nothing for 13 and 14 September (1988: 112–121). From the date of his return to

Vienna, Mozart had ten days in which to compose the Overture and March, for both

were entered into the Werkverzeichnis on 28 September, two days before the first

performance at the Theater auf der Wieden (Rosenthal and Tyson 1991: 57).

In the absence of other commitments this would clearly have been ample time

for a composer of Mozart’s facility. However, as Branscombe notes, there was in fact

more to be done to the score than the composition of these two items. Principally on

the evidence of paper types used in the autograph, he suggests that

…the opera was substantially complete before the end of July, [but] that rather more

than has generally been thought had still to be written (or revised) after Mozart’s

return from Prague in mid-September.…one can deduce that the final revision of the

introduction (no. 1) was not carried out until shortly before the first night, and that,

despite the impression created by the entry in the Catalogue that the opera lacked

only the two purely instrumental numbers which were added at the last minute, no

fewer than three vocal numbers were also written, or at least only attained their final

form, in that hectic period (perhaps less than a fortnight in duration) after the return

from Prague: the terzetto for the Three Boys (‘Seid uns zum zweiten Mal

willkommen’) [no. 16], Pamina’s aria [‘Ach ich fühl’s’, no. 17], and the…terzetto for

Pamina, Tamino and Sarastro (‘Soll ich dich Teurer nicht mehr sehn?’) [no. 19].

(1991: 84, 86).

Moreover, this fortnight must also have been used to carry out final revisions

to the rest of the opera and, more importantly, to supervise final rehearsals and general

preparations in collaboration with Schikaneder. Even if Mozart worked in his carriage

on the return from Prague—as he had, it is widely accepted, with the assistance of

Süssmayr, on Tito during the outward journey—these weeks must have been among

the most frenetic of the composer’s busiest year and we may reasonably assume the

time available to compose the Overture, by far the greater task, and March was

extremely limited.

The completion of the march was, perhaps, the more urgent task for, as Heartz

observes, ‘Even incidental orchestral pieces such as marches had to figure in the score

and parts during rehearsals because they usually involved scene changes and stage

action had to be timed to the second accordingly. But an overture involved no stage

action…’ (1990: 319). In view of this imperative, Mozart made a sketch—more an

abortive attempt—for a March in D minor, given in piano reduction in Example 1

below, presumably written after the composer’s return from Prague in the days leading

up to the première. The relationship between this fragment and the two marches will

be taken up briefly at the end of Section 3.1:

EXAMPLE 1: MOZART’S SKETCH FOR K. 620, NO. 9 (AFTER GRUBER AND OREL 1970: 376).

3

After rejecting this Entwurf, I suggest that, at some point during these days,

Mozart came to use the Priests’ March from Idomeneo as a model for the march he

needed to write for Die Zauberflöte. Their relationship will be demonstrated in

Section 3 but, taking this on trust for the moment, is it possible to identify the factor

that engendered this? In these pressing circumstances, Mozart’s attention may have

turned to the march from Idomeneo as a possible solution to his compositional

problem because of their similar dramatic context, one which occurs only in these two

of Mozart’s operas. Both marches are associated with solemn rites; in Idomeneo the

march accompanies the priests’ preparations for the sacrifice, to placate the wrathful

Neptune, of Idamante; in Die Zauberflöte the march opens the second act, wherein

Tamino undergoes trials by fire and water as initiation into Sarastro’s priesthood.

It is quite possibly this recurrent dramatic context which motivates the musical

affinities. These compositional connections might, initially, be understood in terms of

the notion of topics—recurrent connotative configurations which are part of the shared

musical language of a cultural community. I now briefly outline this idea and then go

on to develop it using a somewhat more radical perspective.

2. TOPICS AND THE ‘SELFISH MEME’

One of the most fruitful products of the reaction against the positivism of the

1950s, the application of the Aristotelian notion of loci topici has provided a rich

seam of insight into the organisation and expressive content of the music of Haydn,

Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries, facilitating the understanding of this

music in terms that are sensitive to its social and expressive context. Ratner, the

seminal figure in this tradition, captures the essence of the idea in noting that

From its contacts with worship, poetry, drama, entertainment, dance, ceremony, the

military, the hunt and the life of the lower classes, music in the early 18th century

developed a thesaurus of characteristic figures, which formed a rich legacy for

classic composers. Some of these figures were associated with various feelings and

affections; others had a picturesque flavor. They are designated here as topics—

subjects for musical discourse. Topics appear as fully worked-out pieces, i.e., types,

or as figures and progressions within a piece, i.e., styles. The distinction between

types and styles is flexible; minuets and marches represent complete types of

composition, but they also furnish styles for other pieces.

(1980: 9)

As with all topics, the march is defined by a set of stable, recurrent

compositional characteristics, including the use of the tonality of C or D major, an

orchestration with trumpets and drums, the use of dotted figures (generally and

variants) in common time, and a less easily defined atmosphere of brilliance and

swagger. The vast majority of Mozart’s marches are of this military type: the

magnificent number 8 from Idomeneo, accompanying the disembarkation of the

storm-tossed Cretan forces; and the choral march ‘Bella vita militar’ (number 8) from

Così fan tutte, attending the embarkation of Ferrando and Guglielemo to the sham

battlefield, are typical.

Within the ambit of this topic, Allanbrook notes that ‘The march suitable for

the ceremonial procession of a solemn, nonmilitary occasion is slower in tempo and

alla breve, but uses many of the figures characteristic of the military march’ (1983:

47). This subtopic, the ‘ecclesiastical entrée’ (: 48), is a great deal rarer in Mozart,

4

being represented in his operas only by the present pieces from Idomeneo and Die

Zauberflöte. In these, the key is F major, the orchestration dispenses with trumpets

and drums, and the mood is altogether more sombre; the principal link with the main

topic, Allanbrook observes, is the retention of dotted figures in duple metre.

Agawu’s perspective on topical theory, motivated by an attempt to add rigour

to its inherent fuzziness by synthesizing the semiological functioning of the topic with

the structuralism of a Schenkerian orientation, is particularly relevant to the present

discussion for, perhaps with greater specificity than Ratner, he attempts to identify the

pitch and rhythmic structures characteristic of given topics. To this end, he suggests

that

The pursuit of a deeper-level, nonreferential process may be conceptualized as a

search for an answer to the question ‘what is the essence (E) of each individual

T[opic]?’ Methodologically, we investigate each T, invoking Jauss’s notion of a

‘generic dominant’ to determine its invariable elements. E’s include a rhythm, a

procedure, a melodic progression, a cadence, and so on. From this list of elements we

find a guiding idea, which often turns out to be a lowest common denominator. Thus,

the succession of E’s may be subject to the same constraints as the succession of T’s,

only on a lower, or micro-level.

(1991: 130)

Moving from the notion of topic to a more unconventional perspective, if a

topic can indeed be reduced to a constituent rhythmic profile, pitch configuration,

textural disposition, etc., and if we maintain Ratner’s definition of the topic as ‘…a

thesaurus of characteristic figures, which formed a rich legacy for classic composers’

(1980: 9), then the topic can easily be understood as an example of what Dawkins has

termed a meme. He notes that

The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our

own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are

met, they will almost invariably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process.

But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other,

consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently

emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still

drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but it is already achieving evolutionary

change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup

of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the

idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a

suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds bit like ‘gene’. I hope my

classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.…Examples of

memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of

building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from

body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool

by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called

imitation.

(1989: 192)

5

This is not the place to present, as I hope to do elsewhere, a comprehensive

account of the nascent discipline of memetics2 as it applies to music; nevertheless, an

overview of the basic principles of this notion is needed before we proceed to examine

Mozart’s music. Consideration of the marches from a memetic perspective will give a

clearer picture of what such a discipline, fully elaborated, might offer, and will, it is

hoped, also afford insights not available using other approaches.

The memetic paradigm rests upon the ‘substrate neutral’ concept of the

replicator. It proposes that genes are but one type of replicator, and that other

configurations of information capable of engineering their replication warrant

inclusion in the class. The evolution of the human brain has created a medium in

which units of cultural information may be replicated within communities. The

definition of what constitutes a ‘unit of cultural information’, like the definition of the

gene itself, is not absolute. For present purposes, we might adapt Dawkins’ definition

of the gene and define the musical meme as ‘…any portion of [musical patterning]

that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural

selection….a…unit that is small enough to last for a large number of generations and

to be distributed around in the form of many copies….a unit which, to a high degree,

approaches the ideal of indivisible particulateness’ (1989: 28, 32, 33).

The meme exists fundamentally as a pattern of nerve cell interconnections

within the human brain. Delius notes that the brain contains somewhere in the region

of 1015

‘variable synapses’, interconnections between neurons which are established

or modified when a unit of information is assimilated (1989: 43–44). These neuronal

structures constitute, to adapt the genetic term genotype, the organism’s memotype;

their physical manifestations—the behaviours and artefacts they engender—comprise,

to adapt the genetic term phenotype, the memes’ phemotype. Dawkins devotes a

whole study to what he calls the extended phenotype, namely ‘all effects of a gene

upon the world’, such as the beaver’s dam and the effects of parasite genes upon their

host (1983: 286). That memes once resident in Palestrina’s brain still motivate

humans to recreate them—in performance, in print, and in various recording media—

four centuries later all over the planet testifies to the long reach of the memetic

extended phemotype.

The success of a given meme, as with any replicator, rests upon the degree to

which it possesses three attributes: ‘…longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity’

(Dawkins 1989: 194). The longer a particular copy of a meme survives, the greater the

likelihood that other copies will be made from it; the greater the fecundity of a meme

the more copies of it will come to occupy the ‘infosphere’ (Dennett 1995: 347); and

the greater the copying-fidelity of a meme the greater its durability and resistance to

mutation, the term being used here in analogy with its genetic counterpart to represent

any change or alteration of a meme with respect to its antecedent form. Memes which

posses these qualities will, by definition, prevail. To paraphrase Dawkins, ‘The

[meme] pool is the long-term environment of the [meme]. ‘Good’ [memes] are blindly

2 Since Dawkins’ genesis of the ‘meme meme’ in the first edition of The Selfish Gene in 1976, several

commentators, notably Daniel Dennett, Aaron Lynch, Susan Blackmore, and Robert Aunger, have

begun the task of developing a science of memetics. Lynch 1996, Blackmore 1999, and Aunger 2002

are the first book-length studies in this field. The foundation of the on-line Journal of Memetics—

Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (<http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/>.) represents a further

advance. More detailed treatments of the subject of musical memetics may be found in Jan 2000a,

2000b, 2002, 2003, and 2004. I am currently working on a book-length study of this subject.

6

selected as those that survive in the [meme] pool. This is not a theory; it is not even an

observed fact: it is a tautology’ (1989: 86).

In comparison with the gene, however, the copying-fidelity of the meme is

relatively low, as the game of ‘Chinese whispers’ vividly illustrates. Deviations from

perfect copying-fidelity, giving rise to mutations, constitute one of the principal

driving forces behind the process of evolution by natural selection, which

…occurs whenever the following conditions exist: (1) variation: there is a continuing

abundance of different elements [;] (2) heredity or replication: the elements have the

capacity to create copies or replicas of themselves [;] (3) differential ‘fitness’: the

number of copies of an element that are created in a given time varies, depending on

interactions between the features of that element and features of the environments in

which it persists.

(Dennett 1995: 343)

This ‘maximally abstract’ (: 343) definition of evolution by natural selection

clearly applies to the meme, such that mutant forms of a given meme which have

higher fitness—in this case greater fecundity—than their antecedent form will tend to

prosper. Just as the nucleotide sequences which constitute successful genes code for

morphologies and behaviours which tend to increase the gene’s prevalence in the gene

pool, so the neuronal interconnections which constitute successful memes code for

behaviours and artefacts which tend to increase the meme’s prevalence in the meme

pool. Stripping the anthropomorphic term of its implication of conscious

intentionality, both genes and memes are, in a word, selfish.

No meme is an island, however, and the agglomeration of memes into co-

adapted meme-complexes of varying magnitude is characteristic of human culture, in

systems of thought, religious belief, and artistic products (Dawkins 1989: 323). The

term memeplex, coined by Speel, will be used here in preference to Dawkins’ more

cumbersome term (see Blackmore 1999: 19). This phenomenon is a manifestation of

selfishness, for it seems the case that co-adaptation tends to increase the fecundity of

individual memes. The increasing complexity of musical structure over time, to take

just one example, is an instance of the power of evolution by natural selection to build

‘systems of great complexity’ (Dawkins 1989: 322). This ‘principle of the

accumulation of design’ (Dennett 1995: 68) is, in Dawkins’ phrase, a ‘blind

watchmaker’ (1991: 5), unconsciously and non-teleologically producing ever more

elaborate configurations by the bottom-up selection of mutant memes. These

agglomerate into ever larger and more intricate hierarchical structures which, as will

be seen in Section 3.2, may themselves be memetic.

Despite the complexity of these structures, it is the individual, particulate,

memes which are the driving force of this process for, as Dawkins insists,

…the best way too look at evolution is in terms of selection occurring at the lowest

level of all….the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not

the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of

heredity.

(1989: 11; my emphasis)

Nevertheless, to appreciate fully this important contribution to the biological debate

over the ‘units of selection’—that is, the level at which natural selection operates—

and to apply it analogically to memetics, we need some cultural parallels to the

7

biological categories of species, group, individual, and gene. The gene-meme parallel

has already been identified; one is tempted to suggest the following for the remainder:

TABLE 1: CORRESPONDENCES BETWEEN NATURAL AND CULTURAL HIERARCHIES.

Nature Culture3

Species Dialect

Group of Organisms Idiom/Genre/Formal-Structural Type

Individual Organism Intraopus Style (Movement/Work)

Gene Meme

On this interpretation, it is clearly erroneous to take the work as the unit of selection,

let alone any of the higher hierarchic levels, for cultural selection clearly does not

work on such large and unwieldy dimensions.4 As will become evident, in writing the

Priests’ March from Die Zauberflöte, for instance, Mozart did not seek to replicate the

march from Idomeneo as a unit. Rather, cultural selection, to recall Dawkins, will be

shown as ‘…occurring at the lowest level of all’, the level of the meme.

Returning to the opening theme of this section, topics, from the memetic

standpoint, are simply memes characterized by the fact that they are propagated at the

level of dialect5 in stable association—in co-adaptation—with extra-musical, verbally-

encoded verbal-conceptual memes articulating such notions as social hierarchy,

affective nuance, and historico-cultural location. In a non-topical musical meme, by

contrast, any co-adaptation between the musical meme and a verbal-conceptual meme

is much weaker, being located largely at the level of idiom and constantly subject to

fracture at the interface between idiom and dialect.

From this perspective, it may be suggested that the musical memes of the

march from Idomeneo and concepts from the dramatic situation which accompanies it

were associated in Mozart’s brain in the form of a memeplex. The recurrence of

similar verbal-conceptual memes in Die Zauberflöte, and the urgency of Mozart’s

schedule, led to an increased propensity for the co-adapted musical memes of the

Idomeneo march to be replicated in the march from Die Zauberflöte, thereby giving

rise to a march whose contours parallel its antecedent as the later dramatic context

accords with the earlier.

3. MEMETIC REPLICATION IN THE PRIESTS’ MARCHES

In order to illustrate the various foreground-level correspondences between the

marches, Example 2 below presents particelle of them in vertical alignment, showing

3 Dialect, idiom, and intraopus style are to be understood in the Meyerian sense: see note 5.

4 Cultural selection can be defined as ‘…the rate or probability that a given innovation, skill, type, trait,

or specific cultural activity or object—all of which we shall call, for brevity, traits—will be accepted in

a given time unit by an individual representative of the population’ (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981:

15).

5 Having defined style as ‘…a replication of patterning, whether in human behaviour or in the artefacts

produced by human behaviour, that results from a series of choices made within some set of constraints’

(1989: 3), Meyer identifies several hierarchical levels upon which this replication—mimesis in

Dawkins’ terms—occurs. He terms these dialect, ‘…substyles that are differentiated because a number

of composers…employ (choose) the same or similar rules and strategies’ (: 23); idiom, constraints ‘…a

composer repeatedly selects from the larger repertory of the dialect…’ (: 24); and intraopus style,

‘…concerned with what is replicated within a single work’ (: 24). Nattiez’ ‘levels of stylistic relevance’

are directly analogous to Meyer’s concepts (1990: 135–136).

8

the melodic content, bass line, and some details of the inner parts where relevant.

Continuous and broken brackets and various other annotations, to be explained below,

indicate specific pitch connections between analogous points in the marches; brackets

below the score marked with asterisks signal extended spans of rhythmic similarity.

Section 3.1 is addressed to this example.

In order to illustrate the various middleground- and background-level

correspondences, Example 3 below presents Schenkerian graphs in vertical alignment.

Section 3.2 is addressed to this example.6

EXAMPLE 2: PARTICELLE OF THE PRIESTS’ MARCHES FROM IDOMENEO AND DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE.

i) Mozart: Idomeneo, re di Creta K. 366 (1781), no. 25.

ii) Mozart: Die Zauberflöte K. 620 (1791), no. 9.

EXAMPLE 3: SCHENKERIAN GRAPHS OF THE PRIESTS’ MARCHES FROM IDOMENEO AND DIE

ZAUBERFLÖTE.

i) Mozart: Idomeneo, re di Creta K. 366 (1781), no. 25.

ii) Mozart: Die Zauberflöte K. 620 (1791), no. 9.

During the course of the following discussion, it should be remembered that

were it not for the obvious connections between these pieces, evident on even a

cursory examination of Example 2, one could not be so specific as to the relationships

connecting the various memes. To identify a meme in, say, a symphony of Brahms’

and trace its evolutionary derivation from a similar pattern in a Cantata of Bach’s

would be arduous, considering the myriad rivulets of imitation and influence

connecting the streams of European music. Even with a musical equivalent to the

recensio of textual criticism, the sources may be too numerous and the labour may be

too great to make the attempt feasible. Here, however, the connection between the

marches is so strong as to allow us to regard them as a circumscribed and discrete case

study in evolutionary relations, permitting us to identify with high confidence patterns

in the Idomeneo march which give rise, by replication, to analogues in corresponding

loci in the march from Die Zauberflöte.

3.1. THE REPLICATION OF FOREGROUND MEMES IN THE MARCHES

As represented in Table 2, which aligns corresponding sections, each march is

cast in a species of the binary form typical of such pieces. That from Idomeneo has

two reprises of equal length, the last four bars of the second reprise, bb. 13–16,

6 Schenkerism, it will be understood, is a rich memeplex of musical and verbal-conceptual memes

fronted by a set of musico-graphical memes. As such, we need to be aware that it filters, and inevitably

colours, the memes that make up the music which is its subject and with which it interacts. In other

words, the view of musical structure we formulate via Schenkerian analysis is, possibly, as much an

artefact as those distortions which sometimes result from the treatment of samples in preparation for

electron microscopy. Throughout this article, my reliance on Schenkerian memes is a testament to their

virulent infective powers; no other comparable analytical memeplex has such high fecundity at present.

Nevertheless, I am fortunately also a host to other memes which impart to me some degree of critical

detachment, and I hope the reader is likewise infected.

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effecting a modified return of the analogous bars of the first reprise, bb. 5–8, the

second subphrase. The first four bars of the second reprise move to an imperfect

cadence on the dominant and have the character of a second phrase/X section in terms

of the Rosen/Ratner three-phrase/rounded binary form model (see Rosen 1988: 18–21;

Ratner 1980: 209ff.). However, these bars also demonstrate a certain parallelism with

bb. 1–4, the first subphrase, an attribute of simple binary form (Rosen 1988: 22–25).

The march from Die Zauberflöte is clearly of the three-phrase type, with an elaborate

second phrase and an extended third, engendered by an expansion of the second

subphrase. For ease of description, the march from Idomeneo will be spoken of in

terms of the three-phrase model which it approximates, despite the ambiguities noted.

TABLE 2: FORMAL ORGANISATION OF THE MARCHES.

FIRST REPRISE :| |: SECOND REPRISE

:|

FIRST PHRASE SECOND PHRASE THIRD PHRASE

Idomeneo no. 25

1st subphrase

bb. 1–4

2nd subphrase

bb. 5–8

bb. 9–12

2nd subphrase,

recomposed

bb. 13–16

Die Zauberflöte no. 9

1st subphrase

bb. 1–4

2nd subphrase

bb. 5–8

bb. 9–16

1st subphrase,

reorchestrated

bb. 17–20

2nd subphrase,

expanded

bb. 21–28

The relationship between the marches is signalled at the outset, for both begin

with the same harmonic meme, I–V–vi. The associated melodic meme is 3– 2– 1 in the

Idomeneo march and what might be regarded as an allelic form7 3– 5– 1 in the march

from Die Zauberflöte, although, as Example 2 shows, a 3– 2– 1 line is also presented in

the alto trombone part of the Zauberflöte march. Their continuations then both express

the melodic motion f1–d2, bb. 2–3. The opening meme(plex), 3– 2– 1/I–V–vi, perhaps

itself a mutant form of the simpler 3– 2– 1/I–V–I, seems common during this period

(the association 3– 5– 1/I–V–vi is perhaps less prevalent); as shown in Example 4 v

below, a copy occurs at the start of Beethoven’s ‘Das Lebewohl’ piano sonata:

7 Dawkins notes that ‘[e]ach gene is able to occupy only a particular region of chromosome, its locus.

At any given locus there may exist, in the population, alternative forms of the gene. These alternatives

are called alleles [or allelomorphs] of one another.…there is a sense in which alleles are competitors of

each other, because over evolutionary time successful alleles achieve numerical superiority over others

at the same locus, in all the chromosomes of the population’ (1983: 283). It seems reasonable to suggest

that memes of analogous configuration might similarly compete for slots in the structural sequence of a

composition.

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EXAMPLE 4: I–V–VI MEMEPLEX IN GLUCK, MOZART, AND BEETHOVEN.

i) 3– 5– 1: Gluck, Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), ‘Chaste fille de Latone’, bb. 1–4.

ii) 3– 2– 1: Mozart, Idomeneo, re di Creta K. 366 (1781), no. 25, bb. 1–4.

iii) Wranitzky: Oberon, König der Elfen (1789), no. 4, ‘Hör, o Gottheit, meine

Klagen’, bb. 1–4.

iv) 3– 5– 1: Mozart, Die Zauberflöte K. 620 (1791), no. 9, bb. 1–4.

v) 3– 2– 1: Beethoven, Piano Sonata in E major op. 81a (‘Das Lebewohl’) (1810),

I, bb. 1–2.

A more striking correlation than that between the Idomeneo and Zauberflöte

marches may, however, be seen by comparing the opening of the Zauberflöte march

with that of the hymn ‘Chaste fille de Latone’ from Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride

(Example 4 i), first performed in Paris on 18 May 1779. Despite the primary focus of

this article on the strong idiom-orientated connections between the two Mozart

marches, this dialect-level connection—the replication of the 3– 5– 1/I–V–vi

memeplex—cannot be overlooked. Moreover, a comparison between Example 4 i and

iv reveals that the connection goes beyond the opening structure of the two pieces.

Bars 2–4 of the Mozart are also similar in shape to bb. 2–4 of the Gluck hymn:

various connections, including the tetrachordal memes to be discussed below, are

indicated on Example 4. Mozart could not have attended the Paris production of

Iphigénie en Tauride, for he had returned to Salzburg from his ‘fool’s errand’ to the

French capital by mid-January 1779 (Solomon 1995: 154). However, Gluck later gave

the opera in a revised (German) version in Vienna on 23 October 1781. Mozart had

arrived in Vienna after his break with Salzburg on 16 March of that year (: 241) and

so might have seen this performance.

After its opening I–V–vi meme, the march from Die Zauberflöte is dominated

at the foreground level by the replication of a pitch meme—i.e., a pitch succession

occurring independently of rhythmic patterning—which derives from the Idomeneo

march. (Two co-adapted rhythmic memes from the Idomeneo march— and —are also replicated in the march from Die Zauberflöte, particularly in bb. 22–28; these

are easily seen in Example 2.) This meme is, quite simply, a tetrachord, which is

prominent throughout the marches either as a conjunct linear sequence or with its

pitches permuted. Strictly, it might be more accurate to speak of several distinct

tetrachordal memes, for clearly their internal intervallic structure varies according to

the starting pitch of the tetrachord. In order to survey and compare these patterns

systematically, Table 3 below summarizes the different forms a tetrachordal meme

may take according to its starting point in the diatonic scale:

11

TABLE 3: FORMS OF THE DIATONIC TETRACHORD.

Tetrachordal

Meme

Intervallic

Structure

Initial

Scale Degree

Pitch Content:

F Major

Pitch Content:

C Major

1

2

2–2–1 1

5

F–G–A–B C–D–E–F

C–D–E–F

G–A–B–C

3

4

2–1–2 2

6

G–A–B–C

D–E–F–G

D–E–F–G

A–B–C–D

5

6

1–2–2 3

7

A–B–C–D

E–F–G–A

E–F–G–A

B–C–D–E

7 2–2–2 4 B–C–D–E F–G–A–B

The table shows that there are essentially four basic categories, defined

according to their internal intervallic structure (where 1 represents a semitone); it

seems logical to suggest that intervallic structure, in addition to absolute pitch

location, should be a criterion in the establishment of memetic equivalence classes.

These categories are subdivided into types numbered 1 to 7 according to the degree of

the scale upon which they begin. They are given in the keys of both F and C major for

ease of comparison with the marches.

These memes are marked with brackets on Example 2, labelled according to

the categorization of types presented in Table 3. As the example shows, the marches

are clearly bound together very intimately by these pitch sequences, some of which

deserve special mention. At bb. 2–3 of the march from Idomeneo, for instance, the

meme I term type 5 is prominent. This meme is replicated at the same point in the

march from Die Zauberflöte, initially appearing in the bass and then being replicated

in the upper voice at bb. 3–4, where it is given in mutated form, as a retrograde. This

engenders a palindrome centred about b. 33–4

.

Further to the earlier observations concerning Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride,

one more dialect-orientated connection deserves mention at this point. Tetrachordal

memes also occur in Titania’s aria ‘Hör, o Gottheit, meine Klagen’ from Wranitzky’s

Oberon, shown in Example 4 iii, although the opening I–V–vi memeplex of the

Idomeneo and Zauberflöte marches does not. Oberon was premiered in Vienna in

1789 and several commentators have drawn attention to its influence on Die

Zauberflöte. Beyond their common infusion of the Singspiel genre with magical and

mystical elements, the two works have a number of stylistic features in common

(discussion of which is beyond the scope of this article), of which the present

connection is a clear and focused example. Essentially, however, the influence of the

Oberon aria on the Zauberflöte march is limited to the replication of Wranitzky’s type

5 meme, bb. 3–4, in Mozart’s bb. 3–4. That we can posit such an evolutionary

connection between these two pieces is supported by the replication of the parallel 6

3

harmonic motion in the centre of their opening phrases. The type 5 meme is also

replicated in the opening phrase of the march from Idomeneo, but in retrograde.

However, owing to the looser musico-cultural connections between Idomeneo and

Oberon—and, let us not forget, the general prevalence of tetrachordal memes in the

dialect of the European late-eighteenth century—it is rather more difficult to

demonstrate the derivation of the tetrachord memes in the Oberon aria from those in

the Idomeneo march.

Returning to the Mozart marches, at b. 5 of each march (the start of their

second subphrases), the pitch collection g1/c

2/e

2, although not tetrachordal, is

prominent, the dotted brackets in Example 2 indicating their different dispositions.

Note also the (per)mutation of the bass pitch sequence d–e–f in the following bar of

12

the Idomeneo march to e1–d

1–f

1 in the inner voice of the corresponding bar of the

march from Die Zauberflöte, again marked with dotted brackets in the example.

In the second phrase of the march from Idomeneo, at b. 11, the type 5 meme is

given in crotchets. The same pitch sequence, again mutated by retrogression, is given

at the same bar of the march from Die Zauberflöte. The result, as the crossing

diagonal lines in Example 2 indicate, is a voice exchange occurring at an analogous

point across two pieces at a decade’s remove. Note also in this phrase the rhythmic

pattern in the upper voice of bb. 9–11 of the Idomeneo march,

replicated in the lower voice of the corresponding bars of the march from Die

Zauberflöte.

There is no explicit recapitulation of the opening subphrase in the Idomeneo

march (see Table 2). Instead, the second subphrase returns reworked, the harmony of

its first bar here, b. 13, subtly alluding to that in the second bar, b. 6, of its first

statement. This reversal serves to convey the sense of an interrupted cadence, as found

in the opening meme of the march:

EXAMPLE 5: PSEUDO-RECAPITULATION IN THE MARCH FROM IDOMENEO.

i) First Reprise, opening, bb. 1–2; start of second subphrase, bb. 5–6.

ii) Second Reprise, interface between second and third phrases, bb. 12–13.

For this reason, I have aligned the vertical of b. 13 with that of b. 18 of the march

from Die Zauberflöte in Example 2, for both are vi harmonies appearing in the context

of V–vi motion and thematic recapitulation. The alignment then tentatively relates the

d2–g

2 motion of b. 13 of the Idomeneo march to the arpeggiation d

2–b1–g

1–e

1 in bb.

21–22 of the march from Die Zauberflöte.

Towards the end of Example 2, the alignment is intended to show that bb. 22–

28 of the march from Die Zauberflöte represent a rich and beautiful evolution of the

corresponding bars, bb. 14–16, of the Idomeneo march. Whilst following its model

closely in essence, the passage from the later march greatly extends that from the

earlier by means of mutation of the analogous memes (signified by placing the

tetrachord type number in brackets) and what might be described as immigration of

additional memes into new ‘slots’ between elements derived from the earlier march.

For example, the type 1 meme from b. 15 of the Idomeneo march is replicated in b. 25

of the Zauberflöte march, in both cases mutated by the alteration of f1 to f1

(an

unmutated form occurs in bb. 14–15 of the Idomeneo march), and further mutated in

the later march by the permutation of the sequence f1–g

1–a

1–b1 to f1

–g1–b1–a

1.8

Immigration of the type (2) and 5 memes occurs in bb. 26–27 of the march from Die

Zauberflöte, bars which occupy a locus analogous to that between beats 3 and 4 of b.

15 of the Idomeneo march. The type 5 meme spanning bb. 263–4

–271 of the march

from Die Zauberflöte might be regarded as a ‘displaced’ statement which, on the basis

of b. 151–3

of the Idomeneo march (types (1)/5), we might expect to have been stated

in b. 251–3

(type (1)) of the Zauberflöte march.

8 Alternatively, one might regard the sequence f1

–g1–a

1–b1 as a type 6 tetrachord in G minor; it will be

seen, however, that I have chosen here to label tetrachords in either F or C major, the principal keys of

the marches, and to regard chromaticisms as mutations.

13

In addition to the ubiquitous tetrachordal patterns, another distinctive aspect of

foreground replication are the end-cadences of each reprise, of which there are two

broad types, shown in Example 6 below. These are, first, the type represented by the

end of the first reprise of the march from Die Zauberflöte, Example 6 ii, bb. 7–8; and,

secondly, a type represented by the three other reprise cadences, labelled x, y, and z in

Example 6 i and ii, this second type being based on the underlying pitch sequence 3–

2– 1 and the rhythmic meme .

EXAMPLE 6: CADENTIAL MEMES IN MOZART AND BEETHOVEN.

i) Mozart: Idomeneo, re di Creta K. 366 (1781), no. 25, bb. 7–8 (x); 15–16 (y).

ii) Mozart: Die Zauberflöte K. 620 (1791), no. 9, bb. 7–8; 27–28 (z).

iii) Implied Eleventh Chord in z.

iv) Beethoven: Piano Concerto no. 3 in C minor op. 37 (c. 1803), I, bb. 66–69.

The x pattern has two moving parts below the melodic line, the lower third and

sixth. In the y pattern this is simplified to just one, ignoring octave doublings, the

lower sixth. The z pattern might be regarded as a mutational hybrid of x and y, in the

sense that with its two moving parts it retains the relative perceptual-cognitive

simplicity of y—simple memes tend to manifest greater copying-fidelity and may

exhibit higher fecundity than their more complex alleles—yet replicates and

intensifies the distinctive confluence of the 4 and 6 found in x (bracketed in the

example). This sonority hints at an eleventh chord, Example 6 iii, and, arguably,

creates an effect both simpler yet more striking than its antecedents, an important

advantage in the survival of memetic mutations. Form z is a meme which survived

until at least the early years of the nineteenth century, as shown by the copy from

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 3 in Example 6 iv.

Having considered the tetrachordal memes at the foreground of the marches, it

will be understood that the sketch Mozart made for the march from Die Zauberflöte,

Example 1, contains similar memes: bb. 3, 7, and 8 of the sketch show descending

conjunct fourth-progressions within the bar, extended after the bar line to make fifth-

progressions (see the brackets in Example 1). The similarity in contour between these

tetrachordal-pentachordal memes and the tetrachordal memes identified in Example 2

suggests that the sketch represents an intermediate evolutionary stage—or, perhaps

more critically, an evolutionary digression—between the march of 1781 and the final

form of that of 1791. Moreover, it is perhaps not too fanciful to see the aria from

Wranitzky’s Oberon (Example 4 iii), with its tetrachord in bb. 3–4, as potential

catalyst which may have triggered Mozart’s interest in his earlier tetrachordally-

dominated march, as well as contributing more specifically to the shape of the opening

of the Zauberflöte march.

3.2. THE REPLICATION OF MIDDLEGROUND AND BACKGROUND MEMES IN THE

MARCHES

Of rather greater significance than the marches’ shared formal types shown in

Table 2—these being communal, dialect-located—are a number of common

14

middleground and background voice-leading structures generated by their foreground

patterning. As Example 3 shows, in the first subphrase of the Zauberflöte march the

middleground third-progression f1–g

1–a

1 from the corresponding bars of the Idomeneo

march is replicated; it follows the replication of the 3– 2/ 5– 1/I–V–vi foreground meme

from the Idomeneo march discussed in connection with Example 4. At this level of

reduction, therefore, what one might term the structural meme—that is, any sub-

foreground replicated pattern—generated in the first four bars of the Idomeneo march

is replicated intact and unmutated in the march from Die Zauberflöte, despite the

differences in foreground patterning.

From this it will be evident, as the heading for this section implies, that

musical memes are not confined to the foreground level. Provided it satisfies the

criterion of replication, a pattern acquires memetic status, irrespective of the structural

level at which it is propagated. In this sense, the Schenkerian Ursätzen, to use just one

representation of large-scale structure, represent memes propagated—repeatedly

replicated—at the deepest levels of structure.9 Moreover, despite the extended

duration of such structures—spanning extended stretches of music up to a movement

in length—they remain particulate, in the sense used in Section 2. It should be noted,

however, that whereas a Schenkerian perspective proposes the top-down generation of

middleground- and foreground-level diminutions from the background, a memetic

view implies a bottom-up process, whereby foreground-orientated memes generate

those at the middleground which, in turn, generate background-level structures.10

The second subphrases show similar structural correspondences. The directly-

replicated element here is the immediate generation of 2/V at b. 5 of each march,

marking the interruption of the Urlinie. Thereafter, in the Idomeneo march, a

middleground third-progression e2–f

2–g

2 and associated 10–10–10 linear intervallic

pattern spans the bulk of the second subphrase. In the march from Die Zauberflöte,

this progression is mutated, becoming e2–d

2–c

2; nevertheless, it is analogous to that

from the Idomeneo march in its placement within the reprise and in its recreation of

the linear intervallic pattern.

The second phrase of the march from Die Zauberflöte, bb. 9–16, is based on a

mutation of the corresponding material of the Idomeneo march, bb. 9–12. The

structural meme from the earlier march is the sequence 2/V– 3/I(N)– 2/V spanning

bb. 8 (where the 2 is implied above the V)–12. This is replicated in the march from

Die Zauberflöte, although with modifications. Chiefly, the support for 2 is alternated,

beginning with V, b. 9, changing to ii, b. 12, and then returning to V, b. 15. This

expansion, as is the case with everything in the bottom-up world of memetic

replication, is a consequence of the mutation and immigration of foreground-

orientated memes.

As noted in Section 3.1, bb. 22–28 of the march from Die Zauberflöte replicate

foreground memes from the corresponding bars of the march from Idomeneo, bb. 14–

16. From the restatement of the 3 in b. 14 of the Idomeneo march, the upper voice

9 Other systems of representation include the concepts of basic form and normative prolongational

structure formulated in Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983, the latter being ‘…specified in terms of

relationships of prolongational connection among structurally significant events, not in terms of any

specified sequence of events’ (: 248), by which is meant the repeated reinstantiation of a few basic

prolongational archetypes by a variety of surface configurations.

10 Narmour’s ‘implication-realization’ model of musical structure takes a similar bottom-up perspective

(1990: 59ff.).

15

traces the pitch sequence f2–d

2–g

1–b1, bb. 14–15, followed by the closure of the

Urlinie, bb. 15–16. A similar sequence appears at the analogous point in the march

from Die Zauberflöte, bb. 24–28, now subsumed within an ascending middleground

third-progression f1–g

1–a

1, bb. 24–27, which precedes the closure of the Urlinie, bb.

27–28. This third-progression might be said to be embryonically presented in the

march from Idomeneo, as the middleground progression f2–g

1 in bb. 14–15. It is worth

mentioning that the third-progression creates an allusion to bb. 2–4—and, indeed, to

bb. 18–20, the opening of the third phrase—of the Zauberflöte march.11

Another

voice-leading event at this point, albeit one closer to the foreground, is the voice-

exchange g1–b1/B–G generated in b. 15 of the Idomeneo march, which is replicated,

transposed to b1–d2/d–B, in bb. 26–27 of the march from Die Zauberflöte, within the

third-progression.

From Example 2 and Example 3, it is evident that the march from Idomeneo

articulates, by means of foreground-orientated memes, a structure situated largely at

the middleground and background levels which, by virtue of its replication in the

march from Die Zauberflöte, is memetic. Example 7 below presents a schematic of

this shared large-scale structural meme showing those middleground and background

elements common to both marches. Common foreground notes are also shown in

brackets. Where two bar numbers are separated by a slash (e.g., 9/14), the first number

refers to the location of the element in the Idomeneo march, the second to its

placement in the march from Die Zauberflöte:

EXAMPLE 7: STRUCTURAL MEME FROM THE PRIESTS’ MARCHES TO IDOMENEO AND DIE

ZAUBERFLÖTE.

It will be understood that in the march from Die Zauberflöte, components of

the structural meme are often instantiated by foreground-level memes which are

dissimilar to those at the corresponding point in the Idomeneo march. Such foreground

memes are either mutant or allelic forms of their counterparts, the latter as in bb. 1–2

of the marches (the foreground patterns 3– 2– 1/I–V–vi and 3– 5– 1/I–V–vi respectively,

which express the background 3/I); or forms which are so different from the pattern at

the corresponding point of the Idomeneo march as likely to warrant description as new

and underivative, as in bb. 9–11 of the Idomeneo march and bb. 9–10 of the march

from Die Zauberflöte (contrasting patterns which both engender the prolongation of

the middleground 3/I). Moreover, immigration of memes into the middleground-

background structure instantiated by the march from Idomeneo creates an expansion—

in terms of length and complexity—of that structure in the march from Die

Zauberflöte (especially, as has been seen in Section 3.1, towards the end of its third

phrase). From this process arises a configuration more elaborate than that of its

antecedent but which, because the example identifies only shared structural

characteristics, is not shown in Example 7.

11

When the close of the Urlinie is considered, it will be seen that the a1–g

1–f

1; f

1–g

1–a

1 motion at the

opening the march from Die Zauberflöte is inverted to f1–g

1–a

1; a

1–g

1–f

1 at its conclusion.

16

Clearly this pattern, essentially a 3/I– 2/V 3/I– 2/V– 1/I Ursatz, is by no means

confined to these pieces, being generated as the background of an enormous number

of tonal movements. Nevertheless, particular common middleground prolongations

associated with this structure—the third-progression f1–g

1–a

1 at the beginning (bb. 1–

4); the vertical e2/c at the start of the second subphrase (b. 5); the zweimalige Akkord

f2/1

/d after the return to the tonic (Idomeneo bb. 13, 14; Die Zauberflöte bb. 18, 24);

and the middleground g1 (Idomeneo b. 15; Die Zauberflöte b. 25) before the final

structural 2—clearly make the whole background-middleground complex distinctive

and particular. More than their shared Ursatz, then, these pieces might be said to

replicate a common Memesatz. Moreover, if one accepts that notes are privileged by

replication, one could legitimately include not only background- and middleground-

level notes but also notes at the foreground level in such a structure, these, by virtue of

this replication, acquiring an importance beyond that which their Schenkerian voice-

leading status would ordinarily warrant.

At the risk of treating an important issue cursorily, it is, I suggest, this

replication of underlying structural patterns, cumulatively extended over time as a

result of the mutation of their generative foreground-level memes, and the

immigration of additional foreground-level memes into slots between extant memes,

which is the driving force in the evolution of large-scale musical structures. By this

process—a cultural version of ‘…Darwinian selection which, given enough

generations, cumulatively builds systems of great complexity’ (Dawkins 1989: 322)—

the simple binary forms of Renaissance dance music may have given rise, over a

period of a few hundred years, to the large-scale sonata structures of the late-

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

4. THE ILLUSORY MOZART: CONSCIOUSNESS AND INTERTEXTUALITY

Two related issues, the nature of human consciousness and intertextuality in

music, arise from my interpretation of the Priests’ Marches. In conclusion, I examine

these in order to develop further the implications of the memetic perspective.

4.1. SELFISH MEMES AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Running through the considerations of Sections 2 and 3 is an implication that

now needs to be made explicit. Memetics maintains that conscious intentionality, the

fundamental attribute of the human mind, is not some unitary presence, but the

resultant construct of a multitude of memes in constant competitive interplay. Dennett

argues that a person is an example of the ‘…kind of entity created when a particular

sort of animal is properly furnished by—or infested with—memes…’ (1995: 341);

and that ‘[t]he haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human

mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to

make it a better habitat for memes (1993: 207).

This ‘infestation’ is a consequence of the fact that, unlike the exclusively

‘vertical’ (parent-to-child) transmission of genes, memes may also be transmitted

‘horizontally’ (between unrelated, and often widely separate, individuals) (Blackmore

1999: 132–137). This, as Delius notes, imparts to memetic transmission an

epidemiological characteristic. From this notion, it is a small step to the idea that, just

as with other infective agents, such as bacteria and viruses, memes can be seen as

17

either mutualist (beneficial), commensal (neutral), or parasitic (harmful); and that the

human brain is truly a tabula rasa at birth (1989: 48–65).

‘Our personalities, abilities and unique qualities’, Blackmore maintains,

‘derive from the complex interplay of these replicators. What then of our innermost

selves—the “real me”, the person who experiences “my” life?’ (1996: 9). ‘Selves’, she

suggests,

…are co-adapted meme complexes—though only one of many supported by any

given brain. Like religions, political belief systems and cults, they are sets of memes

that thrive in each other’s company….In fact we know, of course, that selves are a

myth. Look inside the brain and you find only neurons. You do not find the little

person pulling the strings or the homunculus watching the show on an inner screen.

You do not find the place where ‘my’ conscious decisions are made. You do not find

the thing that lovingly holds all those beliefs and opinions. Most of us still persist in

thinking about ourselves that way. But the truth is—there is no one in there!

(: 9)

This cold but ultimately convincing view is developed in Blackmore’s recent

study of memetics, The Meme Machine, in which she asserts that

The self is a vast memeplex—perhaps the most insidious and pervasive memeplex of

all. I shall call it the ‘selfplex’. The selfplex permeates all our experience and all our

thinking so that we are unable to see it clearly for what it is—a bunch of memes. It

comes about because our brains provide the ideal machinery on which to construct it,

and our society provides the selective environment in which it thrives.…the selfplex

is successful not because it is true or good or beautiful; nor because it helps our

genes; nor because it makes us happy. It is successful because the memes that get

inside it persuade us (those poor overstretched physical systems) to work for their

propagation. What a clever trick.…The memes have made us do it—because a ‘self’

aids their replication.

(1999: 231, 233–234)

To accept this notion, one must first dispense with the dualist view of

consciousness, first advocated in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy of 1641,

whereby the mind is seen ‘…as distinct…from the brain, composed not of ordinary

matter but of some other, special kind of stuff…’ (Dennett 1993: 33). Dennett’s

alternative view, the ‘multiple drafts model’, is materialist in orientation—i.e., it rests

on the principle that only physical matter, and no ‘special kind of stuff’, gives rise to

consciousness—and is based on the premise that

…all varieties of perception—indeed, all varieties of thought or mental activity—are

accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and

elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under

continuous ‘editorial revision’.

(1993: 111)

This model allows him to dispense with the notion, held by some materialists, of the

Cartesian Theatre—Blackmore’s ‘inner screen’—which Dennett describes as

‘…somewhere, conveniently hidden in the obscure “center” of the mind/brain…where

“it all comes together” and consciousness happens’ (1993: 39). In the multiple drafts

model, the Cartesian Theatre is seen as a virtual serial ‘user illusion’ (: 216) generated

18

by the ‘parallel, multitrack’ activities of, in Blackmore’s phrase, ‘…sets of memes that

thrive in each other’s company’. In an eloquent summary of this perspective which

draws telling analogies between the workings of the human brain and the computer,

Dennett contends that

Just as you can simulate a parallel brain on a serial…machine, you can also, in

principle, simulate (something like) a [serial] machine on parallel

hardware….Conscious human minds are more-or-less serial virtual machines

implemented—inefficiently—on the parallel hardware that evolution has provided for

us.…Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes (or more exactly,

meme-effects in brains) that can best be understood as the operation of a [serial]

virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not

designed for any such activities. The powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance

the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which it runs, but at the same time

many of its most curious features, and especially its limitations, can be explained as

the byproducts of the kludges [i.e., ad hoc software repairs] that make possible this

curious but effective reuse of an existing organ for novel purposes.

(1993: 218, 210; his emphases)

On this reasoning (to return to the main subject of this article), the similarity

between the Priests’ March from Idomeneo and that from Die Zauberflöte is perhaps

not best explained as the outcome of a conscious, Cartesian process on Mozart’s

part—although our traditional way of thinking, and the language of musicology,

including much of that in Section 1, still clings to this view. Rather, it can be

understood, in memetic terms, as the result of the replication of a number of memes

within the fertile environment provided by Mozart’s brain. From this perspective, the

Mozart who composed these marches, and everything else listed in the Köchel

catalogue, was but an illusion, a meme-generated serial virtual machine running on the

parallel neural hardware provided by the brain of the living and breathing Mozart.

Owing to the confluence of a number of factors—Mozart’s superior mental

processing power; the particular configuration of his selfplex, various memeplexes,

and countless other memes copied in his brain; and ‘the slings and arrows of

outrageous fortune’—some of the memes of the Idomeneo march, with which Mozart

had been infected through his exposure to the music of his predecessors and

contemporaries, passed into the march from Die Zauberflöte, and then on into the

future.12

To paraphrase Dawkins, the physical Mozart was a ‘vessel’—albeit a

magnificent one—used by memes to convey themselves on certain stages of their

‘long odyssey’ from brain to brain (1989: 33).

This idea of the artist as vessel or medium is often expressed, although not in

memetic terms, in writings by creative artists in all fields. Despite problems of

authenticity in a number of such statements—for example, the forgery of a well-

known remark once attributed to Mozart himself discussed in Dennett 1995: 346–

347—they accord well with the memetic view of consciousness. The following

remarks made by Roger Sessions represent a typical expression of this theme:

12

For reasons of space, I avoid consideration of memes antecedent to those in the March from

Idomeneo and consequent to those in the March from Die Zauberflöte, except to note that the Air from

Handel’s F major Water Music suite (c. 1717) clearly contains precursor forms of memes in the

Idomeneo march.

19

[The composer] is not so much conscious of his ideas as possessed by them. Very

often he is unaware of his exact processes of thought till he is through with them;

extremely often the completed work is incomprehensible to him immediately after it

is finished.

(in Sloboda 1996: 115)

4.2. SELFISH MEMES AND INTERTEXTUALITY

My interpretation of the Priests’ Marches will have indicated how the memetic

paradigm offers a powerful tool for the analysis of intertextuality in music, that is, for

studying questions of ‘…quotation, borrowings, compositional modelling.…the use of

conventions’ (Korsyn 1991: 6). In an attempt at ‘…a new poetics of musical

influence’ based on Harold Bloom’s theory of poetic influence, Korsyn notes that

…Bloom replaces the mimetic view of influence with a new notion of ‘antithetical

influence’, conceiving influence as ‘discontinuous relations between past and present

literary texts’. Influence becomes something poets actively resist, rather than

something they passively receive, and poetry becomes a psychic battlefield, an

Oedipal struggle against one’s poetic fathers, in which poems seek to repress and

exclude other poems. Bloom’s enterprise here changes the very function of poetry: it

becomes a mode of psychic defence, as the belated poet’s quest to defend himself

against anteriority becomes a model for the reader’s quest for selfhood[.]

(1991: 8; his emphasis)

The ‘mimetic view of influence’ is, of course, the one advocated in this article,

as Dawkins’ quotation in Section 2—in which he speaks of deriving the word ‘meme’

from ‘mimeme’—makes clear; and I need, in conclusion, to defend it against Bloom’s

seemingly more subtle notion of ‘antithetical influence’. First, it should be noted that

the Bloom/Korsyn position operates at what memetics would regard as too high a

level in terms of the nature/culture analogy. As Table 1 indicates, it is the meme, not

the work (poem/composition) which is the ‘fundamental unit of selection’, yet Korsyn

speaks of Bloom’s theory as ‘…providing a model for analysing compositions as

relational events rather than as closed and static entities…’ (1991: 15). On a memetic

view, the meme is the ‘relational event’, not the composition. The analysis in Section

3 indicates that the Priests’ Marches relate significantly to each other principally

because they share many similar memes, not because they are Priests’ Marches.

Buttressing this ‘work-centricity’ is the notion of the ‘otherness’ of works of

art. Paraphrasing Bloom, Korsyn asserts that

The meaning of a composition can only be another composition, a composition not

itself, and not the meaning of the other piece, but the otherness of the other piece,

manifested not only through the presence of the precursor-piece, but also through the

precise figurations of its absence.

(1991: 14; his emphases)

The ‘otherness’ of a precursor-piece is, however, a collection of abstracta; it is the

concreta, the words, sentences, ideas, pitches, rhythms, etc., of the other work which

have to be imitated—even if they are subject to the mutation Korsyn terms

‘misprision’ (1991: 10)—in order for us to recognise and speak of influence, however

‘antithetical’, and to chart the ‘precise figurations of…absence’ of the precursor-piece.

20

One cannot, in other words, recognize work x as the precursor of work y if no concrete

element of the former, none of its constituent memes, survives into the latter.

The work-centricity of the Bloom/Korsyn perspective is allied to a

correspondingly heightened ‘composer-centricity’. In common with much

musicological discourse, studies of intertextuality in music tend to see the composer

as the sublime creator of discrete and permanent works of art which, in toto, influence

other works. Moreover, in ‘…map[ping] intertextual space’ (1991: 6), such studies

tend to move, in Meyer’s terms, from the level of intraopus style to the level of idiom,

to see composers as influencing other composers, thereby transcending the boundaries

of the individual work.

It seems that these two facets of the Bloom/Korsyn intertextual perspective—

work- and composer-centricity—derive from the following causes. First, work-

centricity arises from the ‘regulative capacity’ of the memeplex Goehr terms the work-

concept (1992: v, 2; she does not, however, invoke the memetic paradigm). The work-

concept is a verbal-conceptual memeplex which she asserts arose in western Europe

circa 1800, and which acted to privilege the higher-order structures into which

musical memes assemble. On a memetic interpretation, such a memeplex would tend

to mediate the process of memetic replication by incorporating memes articulating the

value of genius, individuality, and novelty, and censuring overt imitation, plagiarism,

and conservatism. Secondly, composer-centricity derives from the Cartesian

perspective on consciousness discussed in Section 4.1—either full-blown Cartesian

dualism or Cartesian materialism (Dennett 1993: 107) drawing nostalgically upon the

notion of the Cartesian Theatre, both of which see humans as controlled by a unitary

and omniscient self.

On a memetic interpretation, what Bloom describes as the poetic ‘revisionary

ratios’ (Korsyn 1991: 10) seem at least partially to overlap with the musical work-

concept memeplex, in that both act to regulate the replication of the memes

comprising a substrate (poetry, music) by means of a higher-order array of verbal-

conceptual memes. In Korsyn’s study, Bloom’s poetic revisionary ratios are applied to

some of the memes constituting the Berceuse op. 57 by Chopin (1843–1844) and the

Romanze op. 118 no. 5 (1893) by Brahms. Clearly his approach presupposes Brahms’

infection not only with the by-then-ubiquitous work-concept memeplex, but with a

musical analogue to the poetic revisionary ratio memeplexes.

To take a brief example of this application in order to reconceive it in memetic

terms, Korsyn claims that tessera, the revisionary ratio of ‘antithetical completion’ of

a precursor-piece, is the motivation for the modelling of bb. 17–44 of the Romanze on

elements of the Berceuse (1991: 26). Moreover, the tessera ratio is associated with the

rhetorical trope of synecdoche, wherein the whole is understood from mention of the

part. In order ‘…to convince us that [his] discourse is more complete than the

truncated discourse of the precursor’, Brahms ‘…emphasises the correspondence of

part and whole: his motive [b. 17, a mutation of Chopin’s bb. 3–4] is a microcosm for

the entire theme [bb. 17–20];…the theme is a microcosm for the whole variation set’

(1991: 58, 27; see also his Exx. 10 and 11). A third component of this memeplex, the

‘psychic defence’ against the precursor, is here manifested as ‘reversal into the

opposite’, whereby ‘[a]fter the reaction-formation of bs 1–16, which masked the

concern with the precursor [i.e., there is no replication in these bars of the memes of

the Berceuse], Brahms reverses [in bb. 17–44] into the opposite, identifying with [i.e.,

replicating some of the memes of] the Berceuse rather than denying it’ (: 58).

21

From this we can see that the ‘psychic battlefield’ of influence Korsyn speaks

of (1991: 8) is fundamentally a memetic one, upon which selfish memes fight for

differential replication. Owing to their high longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity,

we may assume the memes of the Berceuse copied themselves into Brahms’ brain

relatively easily; Brahms, as with most listeners familiar with the piece, could

doubtless recall the whole Berceuse from memory. Perhaps more importantly,

however, the interests of its memes would have been best served by their receiving

phemotypic expression in Brahms’ works, for this would serve to increase their

longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity. However, assuming forms of the

memeplexes Goehr and Bloom/Korsyn respectively term the work-concept and

revisionary ratios were propagated in the meme pool of 1890s Vienna, the adoption of

the Berceuse memes would have been impeded, for the memes constituting these

verbal-conceptual memeplexes would tend to mediate the propagation of Chopin’s

memes by engendering in Brahms what Bloom terms ‘the anxiety of influence’ (: 6–

7). Such memeplexes tend be successful in a meme pool because they serve to bolster

the stability of their carrier’s selfplex against the perceived threats to its integrity

caused by the unmediated incursion of foreign memeplexes.

Having made this point with respect to Chopin and Brahms, it is of course

clear that such conditions did not apply to Mozart’s replication of his ‘own’ memes

from the Priests’ March from Idomeneo in that of Die Zauberflöte. Even if we accept

that the work-concept and revisionary ratio memeplexes had assembled and were

operational by 1791, of the two forms of intertextuality—that connecting texts by the

same composer and that connecting texts by different composers—the foregoing

interpretation clearly applies principally to the second.

The process of memetic competition between musical memeplexes and verbal-

conceptual memeplexes is represented in Figure 1, in which horizontal arrows

represent lines of memetic-evolutionary transmission over time and vertical arrows

represent meme-contra-meme selection pressures:

FIGURE 1: THE COEVOLUTION OF MUSICAL AND VERBAL-CONCEPTUAL MEMEPLEXES.

Composer 1 Composer 2

From this it can be seen that Bloom’s ostensibly more subtle notion of ‘antithetical

influence’ (outlined in the quotation at the start of this section) turns out to be just as

memetic as the ‘mimesis’ his theory attempts to transcend, based as it is upon the

replication of the memes constituting the revisionary ratio memeplexes. These must

have arisen from more simple antecedent forms and are themselves subject to a

process of variation and selection. As Figure 1 illustrates, a process of coevolution is

Selfplex

•Work-Concept

•Revisionary

Ratio

•Rhetorical

Trope

•Psychic Defence

Selfplex

Work y Work z

•Work-Concept

•Revisionary

Ratio

•Rhetorical

Trope

•Psychic Defence

Work x

22

under way here, not between genes and memes (the original sense of the term, used in

Durham 1991), but between memes and memeplexes in various spheres of human

culture.

Finally, it is clear that Figure 1 represents only the poietic aspect of the

revisionary ratios (Nattiez 1990: 11–12). From the esthesic standpoint, however, when

we engage in the study of a work of art—in terms of analysis, theory, history,

criticism, aesthetics, or philosophy—we do so through the mediation of numerous

verbal-conceptual and graphical memeplexes: these are the basis of our various ideas,

methodologies, preconceptions, and prejudices. The point made earlier concerning the

distorting effects of Schenkerian analysis (note 6) is just as applicable to Bloom’s

revisionary ratios. They are one way of understanding a work of art and are, at present,

a fairly successful memeplex; but we must be aware that such memeplexes—and they

are many and varied—inevitably distort that which we seek to understand, even as

they themselves are transformed by the memetic-evolutionary dynamic.

Steven Jan, 20.iv.2005.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The author is grateful to Charles Bodman Rae for his perceptive comments on

an earlier version of this article.

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